African 406: Women Writing Africa

Fall 2020

The course surveys contemporary African fiction written by women. We are asking how women are changing the way Africa is imagined in fiction. African fiction has come a long way since texts like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart where African worlds are depicted as inexorably male-centered. Focusing on novels and stories published within the last five years, the course looks at how women writers are reimagining African lives and redefining the rules on representing African worlds in fiction. More broadly, the course explores the contributions of these texts to current debates around innovation in literary form, feminist discourse, and digital culture.